If you have questions for the Mark et al and you'd prefer not to ask yourself then feel free to send me tonyrogerson@torver.net and I'll ask for you.

Agenda

6:00 Registration; Tea, Coffee and Pizza

6:30 Opening - State of the business – Mark, Nigel

6:45 SQL 2014 – Update – Nigel / Connor – with Q&A

7:15 Big Data drill down – with Q&A

7:45 Break

8:00 SQL Azure Customer Stories – Hatay / Ewan

8:30 Open Q&A – Connor, Hatay, Ewan

9:00 Finish

Bios

Mark Souza

Mark Souza is a General Manager in the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise(C&E) Platform business unit. He is responsible for all Customer/Partner interaction, Content and Community for the business platform products at Microsoft: Middleware, Database and Cloud. Using Customer Experiences he ensures the C&E division is building and shipping products that customers need to build enterprise class solutions. He is responsible for building the best, most vibrant technical community in the world. He also ensures that the C&E community has the highest quality content at their fingertips at the time they need it. Mr. Souza's thirty years in the Information Technology business has consisted of database administration, end-user tool management, systems engineering database specialist/lead, client/server architect, Microsoft regional data technology specialist, SQL Server development customer advisory team and most recently general manager of customer, content and community. Mr. Souza has a Masters Degree in MIS from Marist College and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from SUNY Potsdam. He enjoys spending quality time with his wife Lisa of 28 years and three beautiful children (Andrew 20, Megan 18 and Jennifer 16). He also enjoys reading, running, sports and attending Broadway shows in his spare time.

Nigel Ellis

Nigel is a Distinguished Engineer and the Director of development within the Microsoft Data Platform Group. He is responsible for Azure SQL Database and SQL Server relational database technologies. His passion extends to all things data and ensuring the delivery of trustworthy, highly reliable data storage systems. Nigel joined Microsoft in 1993 where he initially focused on desktop database software and later moved to work on the SQL Server 6.5 development team. Nigel has worked on all aspects of SQL Server development and was one of the founding members of the Azure SQL Database team. Nigel enjoys being hands-on in all details of the product and service lifecycle necessary to get things done. He is passionate about problems most people would rather avoid and has found his match in the Services space. A native of the United Kingdom, Nigel obtained his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at University College, Durham in England. Outside of work, Nigel enjoys traveling with his wife Lynn, mountain biking, backcountry hiking and cooking smoking hot Thai food.

Conor Cunningham

Conor Cunningham is a Principal Architect in the SQL team at Microsoft with 15+ years of experience building database engines and data processing technologies. He traditionally has focused on query processing and query optimization technologies, and is the author of the query optimization chapter in the authoritative SQL Server Internals books (SQL Server 2008 Internals and the recently published SQL Server 2012 Internals). He has worked on various features in the SQL product including table/index partitioning, ranking/windowing functions, data warehouse features such as the columnstore index, and parts of the in-memory OLTP engine that has been announced in SQL Server 2014. For several years he served as an architect of the Query Processor and would focus on end-to-end solution technologies. In recent years, Conor has also been working to develop and improve the Windows Azure SQL Database (aka SQL Azure) service, focusing on core architecture, distributed systems algorithms, and specifically on onboarding the largest customers onto the platform. He currently serves primarily as a breadth architect for this service and works with a number of engineering teams on improving aspects of the service and charting future direction.